Text imprint - Mexico City, Fondo de Cultura Economica, (c1970)
Table of Contents
I. Literature and Revolution
II. Portrait and Selfportrait:
The Hispano-american Novel Confronted with Society
III. "Der Zauberberg" in the Literature of Latin America
IV. Miguel Angel Asturias, Novelist of the Old and the
New Worlds
V. Alejo Carpentier: Magic Realism
VI. Rayuela: or, Order out of Chaos
VII. Cesar Vallejo: The Mestizo Masks
VIII. Parra anti Parra
IX. Anti-literature
X. Antipoetry
Chapter 3 - "Der Zauberberg" in the Literature of Latin
America
It is not my intention in this essay to follow like
a detective the influence of an author or of a work upon
the body of Latin American narrative. My objective is
more modest and, for that reason, more precise. With
reference to a particular problem of comparative
literature I would wish to sketch the development of a
theme which, turned into a myth by a master of German
neo-romanticism, rigorous and firmly distinct, like an
aesthetic mold, passes to other authors and other works
picking up the essence of varied philosophies. The theme
to which I allude is the integration of man, nature and
time in the symbol of the magic mountain. Thus
understood, the mountain ceases to be mere surrounding to
become an active agent of ideas and passions; it
intervenes in the destiny of man: it approves or it
denies him, it provokes him, it saves or it condemns him,
from the heights it witnesses his crises, his efforts and
anguish, disintegrating his ongoing misery in the ashes
of time. "Der Zauberberg": this Thomas Mann called it.
The "magic mountain" as aesthetic symbol has existed
throughout history mysteriously expressing revelations of
diverse peoples and cultures. There were magic mountains
in the biblical literature of the Sinai, from whose
flanks the law of the Hebrew people emerged in letters of
fire, and the Ararat which arose from the depths of the
divine ire so that humanity would disembark, in terror,
from the Universal Flood. A magic mountain was the
classical Olympus and also the circles, the levels and
terraces of the metaphysical promontory of Dante. The
Himalayas were and continue to be magic mountains, as
with the volcanic summits of the Mayan "Popol-Vuh." "Der
Zauberberg," as a literary, novelistic, philosophical,
religious or poetic formula, appears and re-appears in
the golden ages of western literature, in romanticism and
in modern realism. In the 20th century and from the
American hemisphere it is seen under the guises of
Kilimanjaro and of Machu-Picchu.
The mountain comes to symbolize a conception of the
world through experiences in which the intellectual
passion and the erotic secretly combine, physical heroism
with metaphysical terror, social conscience with the dark
currents of instinct. The initiate will easily recognize
this symbolization in nature. Whoever has had supreme
revelation reduces the vital experience to certain basic
concepts and a small number of hallucinatory intuitions
that permit him to define his own condition in terms as
much physical as spiritual. In "Der Zauberberg" these
ideas and intuitions refer essentially to a concept of
Time and, on a second plane, to the conflict between
humanism and materialism. The magic mountain permits one
to confer upon the experiences of the hero a
transcendental sense: the adaptation to the schedule of
the Swiss sanatorium becomes a subjectivist theory of
Time, the triumph over sickness a sensualist doctrine of
behavior and intimate nature of matter, and the loving
embrace to a practical exaltation of the temporal in the
face of the metaphysical.
Before assuming a mythological power in our modern
literature, the Latin American mountain was an instrument
of destruction. In the regionalist novel, the mountain--
like the plains and the ocean--dominates man and hits him
with an individual sorrow. That is to say, it becomes
personified not to integrate itself into the progressive
dynamism of a civilization, yet instead to unite with the
diabolic power that threatens and destroys it. The
mountain of an eminent writer of the past century, for
example, the Colombian Tomas Carrasquilla, is never
separate from the land; it is true that its roots are
confused with those of man, but they fuse at the surface
of daily life or at the bottom of a pedestrian
nostalgia. The mountain there fills an aesthetic function
in the measure that it complements the immediate action
of man, not his creative activity on a universal plane.
The mountain of the Chilean Mariano Latorre, like that
of Ricardo Leon or Jose Maria Pereda, is a synthesis of
concrete values projected in a local tradition. These are
mountains without summit; more properly, they are roads
on the mountain. They belong to a literary tradition that
resonates in the agricultural, in the social and in the
historical. One cannot say that tradition has completely
disappeared, but it is possible to affirm that at the
middle of the 20th century our mountain, as an aesthetic
factor, already corresponded to mythic symbols of
contemporary humanity. Examples abound in the novel and
poetry. Works such as El Mundo es Ancho y Ajeno by Ciro
Alegria, Los Peregrinos Inmoviles by Gregorio Lopez y
Fuentes, Hombres de Maiz by Miguel Angel Asturias, Los
Rios Profundos by Jose Pilaria Arguedas, Hijo de Ladron
by Manuel Rojas, are essentially narratives in which the
mountain exercises magical powers.
It will be surprising to mention Manuel Rojas in
this respect, but Aniceto Hevia, the protagonist in "Hijo
de Ladron," traverses the ranges to discover in the
common man and in the worker's task the seeds of
fraternity; in the alpine steps and footlands, in the
frozen tents of the nomadic encampment, in the market
place and in the train station, in the Andean shelter as
much as upon the open road, in the soldiers' barracks and
on the banks of the Rio Blanco and the Aconcagua, there
hides a simple and lyrical apparatus of symbols, like the
lights of a starry illumination. From the emotion of
tenderness, of solidarity and respect toward man, Rojas
extracts a norm of life and a definition of the human
condition. That his mountain range is also a magical
power is proved, in part, by his theory of the invisible
wound, set down in Hijo de Ladron and directly related to
the idea of illness characteristic of Thomas Mann and of
German romantic literature.(1)
In the novel of Lopez y Fuentes the indian moves the
length of the river and onto the highlands re-living and
recreating the history of man and that Mexican plateau
that had been a road for porters or revolutionaries soon
becomes a pathway of symbols and myths. The route is laid
out since ancient times: the questions allude to
cosmogonies and religions, to ethical values, to roots
that weigh upon man like chains. The marks of time are
disfigured. The indian goes to the mountain where his
experience will unite the primordial to the final causes.
It deals with revelations beneath a lyric splendor: the
man faces the reality of his impotence and abandonment,
fashions a stone god and carries it with him, begins to
get answers from it, but the god weighs greatly and
circles with its creator among the passes. The tribe
penetrates the mountain and discovers the anti-pilgrimage
of its pilgrimage. Nothing has moved: in the newly won
freedom hides treason, war, another slavery. The bell
that sounds the alarm, safeguard from the avalanche, is
no more than a deceit. While the young heroes prepare for
the wedding, the unmoving pilgrims once again ready their
lances, their shields, their stone knives and the
mountain offers its high ledges so that the sacrifice
will begin again.(2)
"El Mundo es Ancho y Ajeno" is a book that shows
marked ideological concomitants with Der Zauberberg. The
Peruvian sierra conceived as a world apart in which the
tragedy of the indian becomes a symbol of the injustice,
of the solitude and of the physical and moral anguish of
modern humanity, Ciro Alegria puts it to work around a
unique axis, from which the themes of social disequality,
Peasant solidarity, heroic sacrifice, disorganization and
fatality, turn like minor mechanisms. This axis, as in
the work of Thomas Mann, is that of time. It is obvious
that Ciro Alegria paraphrases Mann in his speculations
about the nature of time. In them we are led to
understand that he arrived at the magic concept of the
Andean mountain through a wise and deep consideration of
the nature of memories and of their adaptation to a slow
rhythm, a rhythm that corresponds to the technique used
by Mann in his novel. That technique is a direct
consequence of a subjectivist doctrine of time; Ciro
Alegria also thus understands it and interprets it in
this way. These concomitants should be examined without
a desire to give disproportionate importance to the
establishment of a case of literary influence, but better
to indicate how a philosophical idea which gives birth to
an aesthetic formula in European literature serves a
Latin American writer for expressing a characteristic
experience of his land and his epoch.
Ciro Alegria is a novelist who works fundamentally
from the ground of memories. His works are evocations in
the strictest sense of the word and function on the
strength of stimulating one resurrection after another
which, cumulatively, produce a deceptive effect or
movement. Essentially, they are static. Within them, time
does not pass: it is an abstraction composed of the
spiritual experience that is comprised of beings, objects
and pieces. In the foreword of The Magic Mountain one
reads things like these:
This story, we say, belongs to the long ago; is
already, so to speak, covered with historic mould, and
unquestionably to be presented in the tense best suited
to a narrative out of the depth of the past. That should
be no drawback to a story, but rather the reverse. Since
histories must be in the past, then the more past the
better, it would seem for them in their character as
histories, and for him, the teller of them, rounding
wizard of times gone by. With this story, moreover, it
stands as it does to-day with human beings, not
least among them writers of tales: it is far older than
its years; its age may not be measured by length or
days, nor the weight of time on its head reckoned, by
the rising or setting of suns. In a word, the degree of
its antiquity has noways to do with the passage of time
in which statement the author intentionally touches upon
the strange and questionable double nature of that
riddling element.(3)
Compare those words with these others by Ciro
Alegria in "El Mundo es Ancho y Ajeno":
Days pass, new days come....
We admire the natural wisdom of those popular story
tellers who, to separate events, between one item and
another in their narrative, interpolate the grand and
spacious words: days pass, new days come.... That is what
is time.
Time acquires much meaning when it passes over a
deed prosperous or unprosperous, in any case noteworthy.
There accumulate at the side or, better, in front of the
occurrence, tasks and problems, projects and dreams,
nothings that are the fabric of the minutes, fortunes
and misfortunes, in sum: days. Days that have passed,
days yet to come. Then the prosperous or unprosperous
deed, faced with time, which is to say, with the daily
reality of life, assumes its true significance, but it
always remains behind, always further behind, in the
hard grip of the past. And if it is true that life often
turns one's eyes back toward the past, bespeaking a
natural impulse of the heart toward what it had loved,
and in order to extract a useful lesson from the
experience of humanity or to heighten its glory with
what was noble, it is also true that the same life is
affirmed in the present and is 'nurtured by the hope of
its prolongation, or rather, in the projected unfolding
of its destiny.
After the demise of Pascuala, then, time advanced.
And we too shall say: days pass, new days come....(4)
It is not merely a coincidence in tone that we point
to here. It is something deeper. The Peruvian writer,
like Thomas Mann, captured the sense of universality of
his story in its sense of permanence, that is to say, he
integrated space and time. The chronological imprecision
which characterizes El Mundo es Ancho y Ajeno is an
aesthetic element. Throughout a speculation about time
and of the fusion of man with the mountain as a symbol of
immutability, Ciro Alegria, the same as Thomas Mann,
projects the drama of his characters upon an image of
humanity. His story grows, then, from an individual
conception of eternity until it arrives at the limits of
the collective experience. This phenomenon of sublimation
occurs in consequence of the liberating action that the
mountain exercises upon the spirit of man. The indians of
this novel are surprising in their spirituality: it is
because they live within the superior influence of a
magic mountain. The coldness of the moon has touched
them, just as Hans Castorp was transformed by the assault
of the snow. The story of the exodus from Rumi is the
story of man's eternal exodus: the world being alien and
not being owner of one's own self, man keeps moving in a
perpetual exile and remains alone in the continuity or
his downfall. Thus too move the indians of Lopez y
Fuentes. Thus the young warriors of Thomas Mann are
uprooted. But in the attitude with which the writer
contemplates that departure rests the crucial difference
that exists between the message of Thomas Mann and that
of Ciro Alegria and other Latin American novelists. Not
to call attention to that difference would be lamentable.
Thomas Mann leaves his hero without bitterness, perhaps
with a little piety, but in no way shamefully. He
disassociates from him.(5) Ciro Alegria, on the other
hand, identifies with the indigenous community of his
narrative and shares in its persecution and its exile.
Thomas Mann has manipulated his symbols with the key of
his irony; the Peruvian, with the key of his genuine
sentimentalism. Thomas Mann, in possession or his role as
magician and interpreter of the mysteries of the
mountain, is present throughout the entire story,
commenting in the first person upon the actions of his
characters, the development of the plot, even the
technique of his novel. Like the Spanish novelists of the
picaresque and the English Victorians, he requires a role
for his own voice and he fulfills it with gusto and
without hesitation. Ciro Alegria follows him in part.(6)
But irony is not the device which suits him, nor is it
the authentic tonality of his voice. A lyric poet, it
does not embarrass him to empathize with his little
heroes; on the contrary, it overflows at each step; he
dreams with his shepherds, sings with his flute and
string players, he rebels and suffers with his peons.
Whereas Mann breaks, in the end, the spell of the
mountain and remains untouched beside the apparatus of
his transcendent spectacle the Peruvian novelist never
can liberate himself from his fable, and goes on making
impact with the desolation of his people, decrepit and
defeated on the vast icy plateau.
A biographical note could be offered here to
accentuate this difference of attitudes. I do not know in
what circumstances Thomas Mann conceived his grandiose
epic. In a personal letter that I guard like a relic, he
spoke of his novel as a super-romantic work of his
youth.(7) I thought I could still detect irony in such an
affirmation. He was an experimenter and as such did not
fail to deal with the conflicts that agitated his
characters. From the margin of his work he manipulated
the strings like an illusionist of the Renaissance.
Ciro Alegria, for his part, conceived and wrote El
Mundo es Ancho y Ajeno in very peculiar circumstances not
a little dramatic. Romantic, Thomas Mann would have said.
Between the years 1935 and 1940 Ciro Alegria was confined
to the sanitarium El Peral, in the vicinity of Santiago.
He suffered from tuberculosis and had submitted to a rest
cure. La Montana Magica was then a best seller. It was
read and discussed in all the intellectual circles. I can
imagine Ciro Alegria, to whom his friends Manuel Rojas,
Enrique Espinoza, Gonzalez Vera, Cesar Cecchi brought
books, horizontal and still, reading and assimilating the
prose of Thomas Mann, identifying with the characters of
the Swiss sanatorium, living--and in this case the word
need not be taken metaphorically--the great experience of
Time as it bore on his particular case. The routine of
Hens and Joachim is his own, precisely: like them, he
gets up, he rests, he takes his temperature, reads, eats,
then rests.... The faces of doctors and nurses blur like
astral forms in the midst of: X-rays, injections and
blankets. He eats and he rests; reclines and reads. His
life takes on the slow rhythm that the leader directs
with a thermometer. In the evening he lingers like
Castorp, alone beneath the stars, savoring the shadows
that come to him from the mountains; the airy figures of
the Chilean poplars disappear, the mountain winds breathe
and the transfiguration effortlessly takes place. We have
here the Peruvian plains, the solitude, the rocky Peaks
where the pastoral family learns of its damnation; there
are the thatched huts, the lake surrounded by rocks, the
caves that shelter the voice of the fugitive and the
council of the thief. Above it all one sees the myth of
a village advancing from the fog and, little by little,
acquiring humanity. They are the indigenous commoners who
he knew in his adolescence and to whose tragic destiny he
already alluded in "Los Perros Hambrientos." The fable
takes shape: it shall be a message of re-vindication of
the indian, a gigantic work, dense, solid, epic, with a
rich treasure of customs and folkloric legends, with an
idea of liberty sounding at the base by way of a single
hapless unfortunate. This novel already had its style,
that is, its form and its mythological apparatus: it was
the style of Der Zauberberg. Ciro Alegria, already an
inhabitant of the high altitudes, had only to enter the
magic circle and his indians, breathing the rarefied air
of an eternal present, affixed the statuary of myth upon
the pedestal of the sierra.
Miguel Angel Asturias, exploring the mysteries of
Hispano-american experience, concerned with
reconstructing the Mayan-Quechuan cosmogonies through
poetic images and later applying them, like
transparencies, to the existing reality of Guatemala,
often refers to the magical, defining and resolving sense
of the mountain. The most impressive example of this
search and of the literary rendition he gives it is to be
found in two episodes, the fourth and the fifth, of his
novel, Hombres de Maiz. Let us say here that Asturias
does not center upon symbols and allegories, like Lopez
y Fuentes, nor on anecdotes and philosophic commentaries,
like Ciro Alegria. To know, Asturias returns to
pre-historic myths; to define reality, he accepts the
pre-logical relations of the magical and, to project his
knowledge, he uses images, principally
auditory--repetition, incantation, basic values of
nouns-that will create a resonant ambit where the
Guatemalan of the 20th century can seek the reflection of
his own soul. The episodes to which I refer are those of
Blind Goyo Yic and Maria Tecun, and of Correo-Coyote.
In the first of these episodes is presented the case
of the woman who abandons her man, flees into the
mountains, is changed into stone and weighs down her
lover, who chases her, to the end. The mountain exercises
a double power: it punishes the betrayal, but in the
punishment it gives the punished the permanence of myth,
which is the perfect and eternal function of her crime.
Elsewhere, it returns the man's sight to him, it opens
his eyes for him to discover his abyss and fall into it
under the weight of his secret. The second episode is
of a more essential kind: in the search for the woman,
Niche Aquino discovers his demon, unites with it in the
flesh, and in the body of a coyote finds the road to
Xibalba, the subterranean world where man learns the
secrets of the beyond. The Pass in the mountain is here
the key to final knowledge, a true gateway, a magical
power that touches man in an instant and converts him
into light so that he will go to occupy his place among
the shadows. Whoever doubts the existence of this gateway
should go to Peten, search in Tikal and identify in the
rocks the women and the men who lost and found their way.
Asturias' novel makes me think of another, by Jose
Maria Arguedas, Los Rios Profundos, whose leitmotif is
the secret mythological life of the Cuzco highlands. The
mountain of Arguedas is a witch. His is a most delicate
operation in which the myths do not have direct effects
but rather remain hidden like human forms in the shadows,
and talk or simply dream inside the rocks, in the walls,
in the bells, in the rivers and the animals. A child
listens to them. It is not a miracle of communication,
nor the vision seen in a campfire. The action of the
mountain is now slow and cumulative: phenomenon of
atmospheres, of instants and contacts. One could say that
if a revelation is produced, it is the effect of ecstatic
contemplation or of meditation; but, on the whole, the
secret is also revealed in the pass from one Andean
region to another, in one plaza or another, at the
churches, the markets, the shortcuts, upon the lunar
plateaus, sometimes on the run, because the idea of the
journey requires swiftness: to learn to live when the
little hero detaches from his father's side. I shall cite
some sentences I wrote some time ago about this novel to
give a clearer base to this idea:
...that which could be a catalogue of churches, of
town squares, of decorated walls and ruins, comes to live
independently: the stones speak, the patios tremble, the
ancient kitchens of Cuzco glow with gold, the bells call
from mountain to mountain across the shimmering valleys
and rivers, the men kneel, the women cry, and a
child--the child that Arguedas was and whom he carries in
his shadows--embraces his father and sweetly suffers
with the native phantasies that eternally surround evening
in the mountains....
Arguedas first spoke Quiches and later, already
grown, he learned Spanish. Something strange, fascinating
in its complex aesthetic and linguistic significance,
occurred in the process: as if, his Spanish idiom came to
him filled with living sounds, with quick spirits who,
upon touching the words, awaken all kinds of magic
reverberations. Arguedas says 'muro,' says 'aguila,' says
'piedras,' says 'angeles' and what we hear is a material
world in unexpected action, reaching out toward us, as
if wishing to tell us of a secret soul, imprisoned,
pained, anxious to be rescued.(8)
A brief example will suffice to illustrate how the
young hero searches in the mountain for the source of
essential powers. Challenged to fight by a fearsome enemy
in the school, he senses that his will slackens, he knows
that he will be badly treated by the pack who consider
him a "foreigner," so then he goes to the god of the
mountain requesting valor and strength. His invocation is
abrupt, irrational in the circumstances, but fatally
assured:
At night, at rosary, I wished to confess myself and
I could not. Shame tied my tongue and thoughts.
Then, while I trembled with shame, the image of Apu
K'arwarasu came to my memory like lightning. I spoke to
him, the way the scholars of my native region prayed,
when they had to battle or compete in races and in tests
of bravery.
-Only you, Apu and the Markask'a!, I told him. Apu
K'arwarasu, to you I shall dedicate my fight! Send me
your emissary to watch over me, to cheer me from on
high. So by kicks, swine, to the rear, to your hungry
dog ribs, to your violin neck! Whatever! I am an indian,
an indian miner! Nakak!
I began to take spirit, to lift my courage,
directing myself to the great mountain in the same way
that the indians of my region worshipped it, before
throwing themselves into the plaza against the brave
bulls, condors overhead.
K'arwarasu is the Apu, the regional god of my native
territory. It has three snow-covered summits that rise
above a mountain chain of black rock. Various lakes
surround them in which live herons with pink plumage. The
falcon is the symbol of K'arwarasu. The indians say that
in the days before Easter a bird of fire emerges from the
highest summit and hunts the condors, that it breaks
their backs, makes them moan and humiliates them. In
brilliant flight, it flashes over the fields, past the
livestock farms, and then disappears into the snow.
The indians invoke K'arwarasu only in the greatest
dangers. They need only pronounce his name and the fear
of dying vanishes.(9)
And the boy goes to the fight. The child who hears
words in the walls of Cuzco, who cries in silence glued
to doors and columns and looks for signs of the golden
bell in the frozen skies of the plateau, is transformed:
he has become a man in the dialogue with the mountain
and, tranquil and unafraid, he awaits the decisive tests.
A similar idea of metamorphosis in the mountains but
this time not among myths, but rather in the realm of
Catholic symbology, appears in the poetic work of
Gabriela Mistral and, more particularly, in the poem
entitled, "The Flight." I shall quote two stanzas:
O Mother, in a dream
I traverse tarnished landscapes:
a black mountain turning endlessly
to reach the other mountain;
and in the next you seem to be,
but always another round mountain
is there, to obstruct the way
to the mountain of your joy and my joy.
And sometimes not hills ahead,
not inner thoughts, nor breath can find you:
you have fled with the mountain snow
you have submitted to the black rocks.
And you send me sarcastic voices
from three points, and I break in pain,
for my body is one, which you gave me,
and you are the water with a hundred eyes,
and are the landscape of a thousand arms,
never again what lovers are:
a living breast upon a living breast,
bronze figures softening with cries.(10)
The mother-mountain-mother chain has a secret
meaning. In "The Flight," Gabriela Mistral expresses a
fundamental idea: she carries and always will carry the
mother within her, like a fatal affliction. It will be a
weight within her that is tender and painful at the same
time. These two sentiments do not achieve integration.
The image of the mother keeps escaping, calling her,
moving away. Upon following it, she thinks that she will
cross one mountain to find another and another until
infinity. In one moment she sees her dissolve like snow
on the mountain and, then, the mother appears transformed
into a symbol of that identity--of the person and the
native land--which Gabriela Mistral tortuously pursues
throughout her entire life.(11)
The magic here is essentially lyrical and the
mountain is its form: a superimposed symbol to suggest
the transience and the permanence of life in circles that
call to us, lose us, accelerate and overwhelm us in the
divine persecution.
If in El Mundo es Ancho y Ajeno, a symphonic novel,
the Zauberberg is an extended, spacious, intermittent
theme, in the hands of a poet it can gain the force of
immediate revelation, the tone of a sudden exaltation,
the sense of a transcendental vision: this is the case
with the poem, "Heights of Machu Picchu" by Pablo Neruda.
At first sight it could be thought that we are
confronted with a traditional theme of romanticism: the
poet in exile with his melancholy burden of national
memories and his defeated judgment in the name of a lost
liberty; we think of Heredia singing to Niagara with
voices evoking other sublime terrors, those of Byron, or
Schiller, of Goethe. But gradually we recognize in
Neruda's poem the light which by now is familiar to us:
the splendor of the magical revelation when it comes from
the heart of the mountain. An essentially lyric poet,
for whom knowledge should derive from a subconscious
immersion in reality and the terms of its definition are
a leading chain of images, a descriptive and baroque
poet, who when not imperative and visionary becomes
dialectical again, he uncovers his images, grouping and
arranging them, and with thorough lucidity proceeds to
clearly define certain basic keys for the destiny of man
in his tragic movement through history.
The mountain has, then, for Neruda the same power of
supreme revelation that it had for Mann, in equal
transcendent tone, but without the doomed imminence which
is prolonged in The Magic Mountain, turning it into a
mortal trance. Neruda, inspired as by a slow fever, close
to the lights of the summit, feeling, not knowing, the
mysterious propulsion of the mystical experience,
reflects upon man's destiny:
What was man? Where in his ongoing conversation
among the stores and the whistles,
in which of his metallic movements
could be found indestructible, imperishable
life?(12)
Neruda examines the torsion springs of history, and
his conclusions, beyond his bedazzlement by nature,
affirm an immediate reality and his intuition of an
inflexible physical order.
The tone of the poem is anguished at first; obsessed
by the memory of political persecution, Neruda insists
upon reproducing his agitation in the static forms that
surround him. In what follows, he gives himself over to
a metaphysical sadness, to a consciousness of his
solitude and an examination of mortality. What is fatality
in the routine of man? A wreath of daily dyings, the
leaves that the tree loses in no order:
The self like corn stores itself in the bottomless
granary of lost deeds, of miserable events, from one
to seven, and to eight, and not one fatality, yet
instead many deaths came to each, every day a
little demise, powder, worm, lamp that is
extinguished in the suburban mud, a small dying with
thick wings...(13)
I could not love in each being a tree
with its little autumn on one's back (the extinction
of a thousand leaves)
all the false deaths and the resurrections
without homeland, without abyss...(14)
The initial discomfort resolves into a dynamic
confrontation with life. The poet is in front of
Machu-Picchu, the stone fortress, indestructible crown of
the Inca. He contemplates the ruins and on a plane
combining classic nostalgia with the firmness
of his implacable materialism, he reviews the Carpe Diem
theme, and adds:
Today the empty air no longer cries,
no longer knows your feet of clay,
has forgotten your vessels that filtered the sky...
You no longer exist, hands of spider, frail
strands, tangled cloth:
what you were has fallen: customs, syllables
spent, masks of brilliant light.
Only a permanence of stone and word:
the city like a cup was lifted in the hands
of all, living and not, the silenced, sustained
by the silent, a wall, from brimming life to impact
of stone petals: the permanent rose, the mooring:
this Andean reef of glacial colonies.(15)
He discharges his lyrical dynamism and describes
mystically, that is to say, by naming. More than eighty
lyrical epithets comprise the ninth section of the poem,
his litany to Machu-Picchu. The fundamental question can
be seen approaching, probing between the lines,
ritualistically leading to the root of the matter. What
was this man who inhabited that rock in the sky? What
became of him?
Stone within stone, the man, where was he?
Air within air, the man, where was he?
Time within time, the man, where was he?
...I ask you, salt of the roadway,
show me your implements, let me, structures,
trace with a twig the network of stone,
mount all the stairways of the air into the emptiness,
scrape inner organs until the man is touched.(16)
Then there emerges an apocalyptic vision: that was
an empire built on blood, hunger, punishment. The
solitude is suddenly filled with phantastic forms, the
river with voices, the hills with archers, the roads with
moving shapes.
Machu-Picchu, you put
stones on the stone, and at the base, rags?
Coal upon coal, and at the bottom tears?
Fire in the gold, and within, the red trembling
portion of blood?
Return to me the slave you buried! (17)
He implores that slave to arise from his granite
tomb and to be incarnated in his poet's voice and
magician's blood.
Juan Stonecutter, son of Wiracocha,
Juan Coldfood, son of the green star,
Juan the Barefoot, grandson of turquoise,
rise to be born with me, brother.(18)
The Andean Zauberberg has yielded its secret. It had
been a fleeting vision. The poet quickly re-integrates
with the militant ranks, hurriedly, as if descending from
heights where the air became impossible to breathe; he
takes the weapons that are his, his armor, his dialectic.
The resolution of the poem, nevertheless, has clearly
left its comet's mark in the sky: the legacy to history
is a lesson written in rock and its custodians can lift
up one more time and renew their destiny of struggle
without end.
Notes
1 Cf. F. Alegria, "Manuel Rojas: trascendantalismo en la
novels chilena," in Literatura Chilena del Siglo XX,
Zig-Zag, Santiago, 1967, pp.205-32.
2 The student will find a more detailed analysis of Los
Peregrinos Inmoviles in my Historia de la Novels
Hispanoamericana, 3d ed., Ediciones De Andrea, Mexico
City, 1966, pp.165-67.
3 The Magic Mountain, Lowe-Porter translation, Knopf,
New York, 1968, p. v.
4 El Mundo es Ancho y Ajeno, Diana, Mexico City, 1949,
p.53. See also pp. 3 and 391, and compare then; with
the speculations of Thomas Mann concerning time in Der
Zauberberg, Berlin, 1924, pp. 80, 89, 90, 91, 452, 713
and 714.
5 La Montana Magica, 2d ed., Diana, Mexico City, 1957,
pp.843-44. 6 El Mundo es Ancho y Ajeno, op. cit., pp.
30-31, 42-43, 245.
7 Thomas Mann says to me in his letter: "My impression
of your book (Ensayo sobre Cinco Temas de Thomas Mann,
Funes, El Salvador, 1949) is that of an unusually fine
analysis of the chief motives of my novel - this
arch-romantic book that is, at the same time, a sort
of farewell to romanticism, although its irony makes
this moral renunciation of the romantic a little
doubtful again."
8 Historia de la Novela Hispanoamericana, op. cit., p.
273.
9 Los Rios Profundos, Ed. Losada, 1958, p.88.
10 Tala, Ed. Losada, 1947, pp.11-12.
11 Cf. F. Alegria, Genio y Figura de Gabriela Mistral,
Eudeba, Buenos Aires, pp. 105-06.
12 Canto General, Ediciones Oceano, Mexico City, 1950,
pp. 41-42.
13 Ibid., p.42.
14 Ibid., p.43.
15 Ibid., pp.46-47.
16 Ibid., pp.51-52.
17 Ibid., p.52.
18 Ibid., p.54.